I had a happy surprise yesterday morning when I turned on the Jeep's radio and it worked!

Those of you who have been paying attention the way you should might recall that about a month ago we received a tiny bit of rain up here in the desert where I live, about 1/8" or 2-3mm of the stuff. It was just enough to spot the Jeep's dashboard but not enough to even form a shallow pool in the useless depression built into the top of the dashboard, the one that looks like it would hold something until the first time you turn the Jeep either left or right and have to pick it up from under your feet or dig it back out from the passenger footwell or out from under the front seats.

It would seem, though, that minor as it appeared, that little rain was enough to kill the radio. Oh, not entirely, it still turned on and displayed the time, which it even does when it's off, and would even display the icon for a CD being in the drive, but, no, it wouldn't produce any sound.

So, as far as I was concerned, it didn't work.

I tried pushing all the buttons I normally use and then some I never do. None of them did anything, but I was able to eject the CD that was in the drive. It did that a couple times, mostly as a test.

Since it displayed the time, I figured it hadn't blown a fuse and was getting electricity okay, but since it always displays the time, I couldn't tell if it was off or on, and I spent a lot of time pushing the on-off button and also the the one that selects AM or FM, in countless vain attempts to see if it would help bring it back to life, but it never did.

It took about an hour for me to resign myself to having no sounds in my Jeep, but I've had two or three cars with no radio in my life and it's the sort of thing I get used to. It's easier where I am now because there's only a few stations, anyway, and none of them are KROQ.

It's easy for me to skip the oldie stations because they pretty much only play songs I never really liked when they were popular. About half the time I can play my CDs if I really want to listen to anything, but I can only do that on good roads (otherwise I bounce around so much, every time I listen to one it skips and gets dinged).

I spend a fair amount of time re-burning CDs.

A couple days after the radio died, I was still hitting the buttons every fifteen minutes or so, and the radio was still doing nothing. I thought some about buying a new one but mostly told myself that it was just another example of the "Life of Deprivation" I live up here. There's too many other things I need to spend money on a radio.

But I looked, anyway. I used to get replacement radios at car radio stores, but there's only one of those up where I live and it's all high powered stuff. Walmart, as it turned out, carries a little cheap  one that would serve me okay, but I'd have to install it myself and it's smaller in size than the one that comes with Rama.

The installation kits, which they didn't have in stock, anyway, would make buying it even more out of reach, but I wasn't about to try that in any case. The electrical connections didn't worry me, but one thing I've learned about the desert is that the only thing it has less use for than standing water is plastic, and Rama's dashboard is pretty much all plastic.

While I used to be halfway decent at working on engines and the like, bodywork was always a closed book to me. All those little clips and knowing where to pry things apart were never in my book of knowledge. When I considered that it would be at best a 50-50 chance that I could get out the old one without destroying the dashboard, I gave up even thinking about putting in a new one.

Plus, since the new one was smaller, it would leave an unsightly hole even if I could get the old one out and put the new one in.

So I decided to keep practicing my favorite way of fixing things, which begins and ends with seeing if it fixes itself.

I think I'm a patient man, so the waiting part is right up my alley and that's just what I did. Oh, sure, I'd hit the on-off button and some of the other ones, but I'd pretty much given up hope when yesterday the radio surprised me by working!

You can imagine my delight when instead of just continuing to show the time, the display changed to say "Volume 9." Eureka! I turned it up to fifteen or so so I could hear what it was doing and, lo and behold, it was playing! I got to drive to the dog park listening to the show I liked (and had missed) and when we got nearby, slipped in the CD with the Bananrama songs I liked to have playing while I entered the park.

Now it's been a day and I'm happy to report the radio still works and still gets both AM and FM stations, can switch between them, and can play any CD I slip into the drive. Just like it used to! It's like it never died at all!

The only thing giving me pause is the knowledge that I did nothing to fix it. It fixed itself, sure, but that just reinforces this idea I have that things will do that and give me even more reason to not do anything.

Those clothes aren't going to put themselves away and the dishes aren't about to wash themselves no matter how much time I give them. So, instead of doing anything about them, I'm writing about how things take care of themselves if  you give them enough time.